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Making Masks

My sons decided that they wanted to make masks out of play dough. Unfortunately we didn't have any shop bought products at home, but I remembered from my own childhood that we used to make our own out of flour.

We had to do a couple of experiments with ingredients but we ended up using the following:

2 cups flour2 cups warm water1 cup saltA tablespoon vegetable oil

These are rough measurements though as I found that I had a certain consistency in mind when I was mixing it so I kept adding flour and water until happy.

Once we had the dough ready we had a mess around of shapes and creatures that we wanted to make. We settled for masks or heads as they were nice and flat and the boys wanted them to be baked so that they would harden and be ready for painting - kinda like fimo.

Once they were happy with their creations, I laid them out on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper.

The oven had been pre-heated to 180 degrees, but once the tray was in the oven I dropped it down to 150 cos I didn't want them to cook on the outside too quickly but leave a doughy soft middle.

I have to admit you need to distract the kids whilst baking as it took a good couple of hours for them to bake hard all the way through!

When we thought that they were hard enough, we took them out and placed them on a cooling tray. Once cooled they can be painted :) We used acrylic paints as they generally dry nice and quick.

When everyone was happy with their paint job, we left them to dry and then re-painted over the whole thing with pvc craft glue. The glue protects the paint and although thick and white and gloopy, it does dry clear. We painted both the front and backs of our mask/heads as we wanted them to be waterproof all the way round.